No, we are not $cientologists, and you will not find any $cientology-run links on this page. Please do not email us about Breggin, Szasz etc. being $cientologists. Impossible as it may seem, there are people other than $cientologists who are deeply concerned about these issues.

You Can Help Stop Psychiatric Oppression!

To stop the forced screening and drugging of children, Please Support Ron Paul's HR2387, 'Parental Consent Act of 2007' (Child Medication & Safety Act)!

Proposed Universal Mental Health Screening Bush's New Freedom in Mental Health Commission proposes mandatory screening of preschoolers and their parents for mental illness, expanding school-based mental health programs and requiring specific treatments for specific conditions, including the use of specific medications.

The Psycho State This letter is from Ron Paul, M.D. - a Republican member (from Texas, no less) of the House of Representatives - explaining why it is necessary to oppose Bush's "New Freedom Act".

Psychiatrists, Children, and the Drug Industry's Role By Gardiner Harris, New York Times. A good introductory article to the issue -- but see the articles below for the real horror story.

The Rebecca Riley Story So, let's see. You have a brutally abusive father who's violating a restraining order placed on him by his wife after he molested his stepdaughter, you have his three under-12 children in daily contact with him, he's beating the crap out of his son in front of witnesses, and the kids are the ones who are diagnosed as mentally ill and are put on cocktails of antipsychotics and tranquilizers. While social workers and DCFS look the other way, because the psychiatrist had them convinced the medications and amounts were appropriate. If the youngest girl had not died, we'd never have known about this. Much more here...

Medicating Aliah By Rob Waters, from Mother Jones magazine. The psychiatric industry is altogether too enmeshed with the pharmaceutical industry, and anyone who gets close to the truth has their career destroyed. Meanwhile, children with little or nothing wrong with them are being given not just one drug, but six or eight at a time.
This is not some 1984 speculation. This is happening NOW.

Psychiatric Meds Drove My Autistic Son Crazy Be very, very careful about any doctor who says your autistic child or young adult needs to be on psychiatric medication. Look up neuroleptic toxicity for some hard facts.

When Colleges Go On Suicide Watch By Julia Rawe, Time Magazine. Universities are forcing students to "get help" or leave school, whether they actually have a mental disease or not. Some who are really having difficulty say they're helped by this, but others say it's all about the lawsuits.

Please respond to New York Times Article Discrediting Repressed Memory This was an article in the New York Times Magazine (http://www.nytimes.com/magazine) covering research which equated recovered memories of child abuse with alien abduction fantasies. You can write to the Times to respond.

Shirley Allen, a self-sufficient Illinois widow, held police and mental health authorities at bay for thirty-nine days in September and October, 1997. Ms. Allen was known for speaking her mind about mental health issues and National Guard activity in the region of the state where she lives. In an attempt to acquire her property, which includes a lucrative oil well, her brother obtained a court order that she undergo "psychiatric evaluation", and the cops served the order with a side of teargas. The media portrayed Ms. Allen as a "mentally unstable" recluse, largely because she's got a gun and ain't afraid to use it.

Things haven't changed much since the 1800s, when composer Hersilie ("Memoirs of a Madwoman") Rouy was institutionalized by her brother so he could get his hands on the fortune her stepdad had left her.

Anti-Psychiatry Coalition A nonprofit volunteer group consisting of people who feel we have been harmed by psychiatry. Many links, the truth all comes out. It's nothing but stigmatizing children, elderly people and anyone who is different, simply for profit and greed.

More on the anti-psychiatry movement here.

Association for Humane Psychiatry Don't know how genuine these people are, but thought it might be worth putting up.

Celebrating Autism NPR story on how autistics seek acceptance, not cures.

Ballastexistenz Thoughtful and passionate blog about autism and disability.

Confessions of a Noncompliant Patient By Judi Chamberlain. "I was presumed not to be able to take care of myself, not to be able to make decisions in my own best interest, and to need mental health professionals to run my life for me. For this total disregard of my wishes and feelings, I was expected to be appreciative and grateful. In fact, anything less was tacked as a further symptom of my illness..."

An Encyclopedia of Insanity L.J. Davis' brilliant article on the idiocies perpetuated by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Did you know you could be sent up for bad handwriting or drinking too much coffee?

The Function of Expert Evidence in Differentiating Real from Fabricated Sexual Abuse Claims Some of the most unlikely cases turn out to be real; some of the most likely ones turn out not to be. Read this if you have or believe in recovered memories or if you doubt that recovered memories could ever be real.

Making Advance Directives Work For You By Dr. Daniel Fisher. Describes the purpose of the Advance Directive legal form and how to create one. These are extremely useful for people in crisis to prevent involuntary hospitalization, restraints and drugging.

Did you know that hearing voices is not necessarily a sign of mental illness? People in non-western cultures have always known this, but a controversial British study has just now allowed mental health pros to begin to admit it! (Scroll down to "Finding Meaning in Voices")

Did you know that if you hear voices that bother you, talking back to them can help? Damn clever, these British people!

The Double Bind This is, at gut level, about crazymaking behavior. Addresses exactly what happens in emotional abuse, and suggests that not all schizophrenia is biochemical but can be caused by the crazymaking behavior of others. One of the hard lessons we have learned in life is that other people can make you feel crazy.

Jayme's You are invited to read and contribute to "Mental Hospital Horror Stories." Let's break the silence!

An Open Letter To Parents Considering Intensive Behavioral Therapy For Their Child With Autism Courtesy of Virgynia King. A stinging indictment of behaviorist methods. Applies to all children -- not just autistics. If you feel your child needs therapy, please consider play therapy or some other non-behaviorist method.

Lesbian Feminist Community Therapist Escaped Official Disbarment for Unethical Sex An eye-opening scandal! Has this happened to you?

Mind Matters Review Articles on psychiatry and the theory of the mind.

Mindfreedom Used to be Dendron. Internet human rights mailing list: Free, one-way, low-volume. To subscribe e-mail majordomo@efn.org with just these two words in body of your message (not subject line): subscribe dendrite

John Nash Criticizes A Beautiful Mind The real "Beautiful Mind" guy has some harsh things to say about the Russell Crowe film.

National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy America's mental institutions are still the shame of the nation. Kids are being drugged into submission, the media convinces us that mentally ill people are dangerous and violent, and what are we going to do about it?

No Autistics Allowed Explorations in discrimination against autistics. What are non-autistic people deciding for autistic people? Pay particular attention to Bettelheim's Worst Crime: Autism and the Epidemic of Irresponsibility. OF INTEREST TO ABUSE SURVIVORS.

Autistics speak for ourselves at autistics.org. You might also want to read some blogs by autistic people: Ballastexistenz is a good place to start.

No Force Coalition Canadian group dedicated to eliminating force in psychiatry.

Prozac Truth Be fully informed when taking any of the new psychiatric medications, or especially putting a child or loved one on them.

Psychdata Blog reprints news articles from the U.S., England and Australia concerning the use and misuse of psychiatric drugs.

Psychiatric Drug Facts By Peter R. Breggin, M.D. What your doctor may not know about how psychiatric drugs really work, adverse drug effects on the brain and mind, the role of the FDA, drug company practices, recent medical and legal developments, electroshock and psychosurgery.

Ritalin Death: The Truth Behind ADHD A grieving father now dedicated to informing the public of the dangers of psychiatric meds. Pay particular attention to the page revealing the facts behind what so-called experts tell you about ADHD. Also check out ADHD Fraud, especially if you or your child are labeled.

Drug up your kid today! This just in: Prozac is a better treatment than talking to your kid. Isn't life fabulous?!: Michael Morford talks about the medical establishment's current obsession with stuffing kids full of nerve-deadening chemicals as a solution not only to ordinary life problems, but normal teenage behavior.

Unfortunately, Uncle Wayne and the Psychiatric Survivors Advocacy & Liberation Movement are no longer with us.

Shoshanna's Psychiatric Survivor's Guide Hasn't been updated for a while -- still contains much valuable information.

Thomas Szasz Is the mental health industry merely another tool of social control?

You can read The Szasz Blog for up-to-date information.

My Personal Experience With False Memories By Anthony Temple. How he learned that it is possible to experience false memories without even being in therapy.

Empowering website for recovery from anorexia and eating disorders. We guarantee you it's unlike anything you have ever seen before.

Stop Bad Therapy Some hard facts presented. WARNING: These guys respect the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, which we do NOT, but we link to this site because multiples and abuse survivors who have been exploited have told us they've gotten real help here.

Dangerous Therapy An indepth look at the Bennett Braun scandal.

Cult of Madness "...It was clear these doctors did to me exactly what they said my family did. They isolated me, fed me lies, and made me crazy." Some more background on Colin Ross here.

Roger Brown's Articles This sociologist has written a series of articles exposing organized crime and corruption in the child-saving institutions such as Protective Services.

Before you decide that we are pro-FMSF, click here.

Books

Title: Talking Back To Prozac: What Doctors Won't Tell You Author: Peter and Ginger Breggin Publisher: St. Martin's 1995 ISBN: 0312956061 Amazon.com sez: It's time to take a closer look at this supposedly "safe" drug. Peter Breggin picks through the studies used to justify Prozac's safety, often uncovering flaws and shoddy science. He details the FDA approval process, including who on the panel was paid by whom. The key players and the details will surprise you.

Title: They Say You're Crazy: How the World's Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who's Normal Author: Paula J. Caplan Publisher: Perseus, 1995 ISBN: 0201407582 Amazon.Com Sez: In a disturbing insider's look at how the mental health establishment decides who is normal and who is "sick," [Caplan] charges that the DSM board's decision-making process, dominated by a handful of conservative white male psychiatrists, is arbitrary, condescending, profit-driven and riddled with personal biases and political consideration. Facile labeling of personality problems, she shows, can cause personal suffering as well as material harm because DSM categories figure prominently in who wins child custody, who gets hospitalized against their will and whose psychotherapy is covered by insurance.

Title: The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders Author: Peter Conrad Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press ISBN: 080188585X A scholarly examination of how the psychiatric industry, in cooperation with the mass media, furthered the notion of ordinary life problems as mental diseases that require lifelong medication.

Title: The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder Author: Allan V. Horwitz Publisher: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007 ISBN: 0195313046 By accident or design, modern psychiatry doesn't do enough to distinguish between actual depressive disorders and simple feelings of sadness, grieving, or even just the blues. Like shyness, the normal feelings and behaviors associated with sadness are being pathologized. One reviewer says: "When we take a medication to make ordinary sadness go away, are we perhaps postponing our reckoning with experiences of sadness until a later time when such experiences may catch up with us?"

Title: Making Us Crazy: DSM The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders Author: Herb Kutchins Publisher: Free Press, 1997 ISBN: 0684822806 This book contains cogent information on the creation of the DSM as a political tool, mostly for the benefit of insurance companies. See also Encyclopedia of Insanity, by L.J. Davies.

Title: Shyness -- How Normal Behavior Became A Sickness Author: Christopher Lane Publisher: Yale 2007 ISBN: 0300124465 Remember the outcry when the cute little cartoons advertising Zoloft, an antidepressant, were retooled to promote Zoloft's use as a medicine for social anxiety disorder? Or the Prozac commercial that magically changed the nametags at a cocktail party? First you invent the pill, right, then you invent the illness for which the pill is the cure -- you know that one. Using as his sources letters and memos written by mental health professionals, Lane builds a very convincing case for another instance of mental health industry fraud in which shy persons are told they have a mental disease. He also demonstrates how the public was fooled into thinking that these pills had been sufficiently tested and were relatively harmless.

Title: Against Therapy Author: Jeffrey Masson Publisher: Common Courage '93 ISBN: 1567510221

Please read this before opting for any kind of mainstream psychotherapy. You owe it to yourself and to your household, if any. 4/25/2002 6:58 a.m. I am really sorry about the 'Acrylic Fiber' results on this link! It has been fixed.

Also by Jeffrey Masson:
Final Analysis Did your shrink have to go through this? You have a right to ask'em.

Title: For Your Own Good: Hidden Brutality in Child-Rearing, and the Roots of Violence Author: Dr. Alice Miller Publisher: Noonday ISBN: 0374522693

If you think you were never abused, read this book. Most people do suffer some form of brutality in childhood -- often covert, emotional or intellectual stifling -- and it does affect their thinking and feeling in later life. "It made me stronger" often simply means "it made me numb". This is not a whiny book, nor is it a Bradshaw feel-good hugfest. Child abuse exists. Don't revisit it on your kids.

This book is now available in its entirety on line. Click here to read For Your Own Good in free e-text.

Title: Bedlam: Greed, Profiteering, and Fraud in a Mental Health System Gone Crazy Author: Joe Sharkey Publisher: St. Martin's 1994 ISBN: 0312104219

Based on the award-winning "Profitable Addictions" series of investigative reports by the Houston Chronicle, this book explains the classic psychiatric insurance scam by focusing on one institution, Fair Oaks Hospital in Summit, New Jersey. Amazon says: "Many in the psychiatric profession have abandoned the severely mentally ill while private, investor-owned hospitals offer bounties of up to $1500 to clergy, teachers, police and "crisis counselors" for recruiting -- one Texas legislator uses the term "body-snatching" -- troubled adults, adolescents and children covered by insurance policies that pay up to $30,000 for inpatient care. In 1993, the fraud practiced by Medicare- and Medicaid-subsidized hospital chains such as National Medical Enterprises, with 86 psychiatric hospitals and revenues of $1.74 billion in 1991, was revealed by the FBI. The psychiatric industry, Sharkey warns in this chilling, well-documented account, is lobbying for a large slice of the health reform pie and continues to "create mental illness with advertising."

Title: The Myth of Mental Illness (Revised Edition, 1984) Author: Thomas Szasz Publisher: Harper Collins ISBN: 0060911514 This book is forty years old (updated in '84) and is as relevant today as the day it came out. Szasz uses clear, simple language to expose the facts behind the stigmatization of those who are different. He insists that most of the things we call mental illnesses are merely variances in normal human behaviour, or normal emotional states like loneliness or insecurity that could be helped in ordinary ways. You may not agree with everything he says, but that's not why this book is listed here.

Title: Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences Author: Thomas Szasz Publisher: Harper Collins ISBN: 0815604602 Szasz restates his claims, presents his findings and explains his theories in plain language. He even gives you a bit on why he uses plain language. This book may be a better introduction than "The Myth of Mental Illness" if you've never read Szasz before. His theme is always the same: what we term mental illness is, by and large, behaviour which is explicable and reasonable given the society in which we live. Society's vigorous repression (through drugs, electroshock, etc.) of those who are different has become a form of institutionalised hate crime. We have come to regard the mental health industry as a kind of religion, as the standard against which normalcy is measured.

Title: The Medicalization of Everyday Life Author: Thomas Szasz Publisher: Syracuse Univ. Press ISBN: 0815608675 Once more, Szasz takes a look at our lives and times and how the pharmaceutical industry, in cooperation with the mainstream media and the legal system, have formed a government of social control. Medical and health decisions are made for us, "for our own good", every day. Find out what the system is doing to you and your kids -- how much of your life can you take back?

Title: Coercion as Cure, A Critical History of Psychotherapy Author: Thomas Szasz Publisher: Transaction 2007 ISBN: 0765803798 Like Masson, Szasz pulls no punches. This is what happens when we presume that a certain select group of people know more about ourselves than we do. This is not about the misuse of psychiatry; this is about the idea that psychiatry itself is a misuse of social and political power.

Want more on Thomas Szasz? Visit http://www.szasz.com/.

Title: Wounded Innocents Author: Richard Wexler Publisher: Prometheus, 1995 ISBN: 0-87975-936-4

"The war against child abuse has become a war against children. In the name of "child protection" innocent families are disrupted nearly two million times every year and thousands of children are needlessly torn from their parents and thrown into foster care-- even as children in real danger are ignored. While the problem of child abuse is serious and real, journalist Richard Wexler charges that our solutions to the problem have actually made it worse--in fact, hurting the very children that they were intended to help." From the Lifting the Veil review.

Read about the New York City Admin. for Children's Services and what they do to families in the name of "protecting the children".

Title: Creating Hysteria Author: Joan Acocella Publisher: Jossey-Bass 1999 ISBN:: 0787947946

Joan Acocella has expanded the controversial article she originally wrote for The New Yorker a couple of years ago. It's an excellent book, makes excellent sense, is a powerful expose of the crap that goes on in the mental health industry, and draws entirely the wrong conclusions. Even so, we recommend that EVERYONE who is in therapy (multiple or not) read this book. Read it if you have ever had questions about the way your doctor tries to dredge up questionable traumatic memories. If you feel like you're being pressed to accept a certain view of yourself, your people, and your childhood that doesn't fit the truth that YOU know, then it's time to look for a different therapist. Many therapists DO use the tactics described in this book.

Acocella may be completely mistaken in saying multiplicity doesn't exist, but she is dead on accurate about what goes on in the mental health industry.

Buy "Creating Hysteria" through amazon.com